Just days before its scheduled broadcast, ABC’s “The Path to 9/11” — a $40 million, two-night miniseries that producers say is based on the 9/11 Commission report — has come under sharp criticism for the veracity of some key scenes depicting the Clinton administration’s response to terrorism.

In particular, Democrats, liberal bloggers and former Clinton aides have attacked a scene involving Samuel “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, refusing to give the go-ahead for a CIA-led attempt to capture Osama bin Laden.

In a statement earlier this week, Berger called the depictions of his actions “complete fabrications” and noted that they “are not contained in theSept. 11 Commission report.” He also fired off a letter to Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, asking for revisions in the miniseries.

Berger is being supported by ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former anti-terrorism adviser to both Clinton and President Bush who is portrayed in the film as a heroic figure. The scene “didn’t happen. It’s utterly invented,” Clarke wrote in a posting on ThinkProgress.org, a liberal Web site.

In response, ABC issued a press release saying “‘The Path to 9/11’ is a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources. … The events that led to 9/11 originally sparked great debate, so it’s not surprising that a movie surrounding those events has revived the debate.”

Network to run disclaimer

The network did say it would run an expanded disclaimer during the film pointing out that it is not based solely on the commission’s report.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and an adviser to the miniseries, said in its defense that “for dramatic and narrative purposes, there are scenes that are fictionalized in some ways because they’re composites of what took place. You have to do that in a miniseries.”

But he insisted that there were occasions when CIA operatives working with the Afghan tribes in the Northern Alliance “thought they might have been able to get bin Laden and on those occasions, the plug was pulled for various reasons.”

There is a reference in the commission report to a plan aimed at capturing bin Laden during the Clinton years, but it says the plan was vetoed by then-CIA director George Tenet, not by Berger. The report also notes that no Americans were to be directly involved in the plan, which was never put into operation.

The controversy over “The Path to 9/11” — scheduled to air without commercials Sunday and Monday — is a mirror image of the uproar in 2003 over “The Reagans,” a CBS miniseries on the lives of the late president and the former first lady.

In that case, conservatives — led by radio talk show hosts and bloggers — charged that the film was loaded with historical inaccuracies and made-up dialogue. CBS eventually pulled the program from its schedule, although it aired several months later on Showtime.

This time, it is the left urging a network to cancel or substantially alter a film, while the right has risen to its defense.

The liberal blogosphere has been filled with condemnations of “Path” since late last month, when the first part of the film was screened by Washington’s National Press Club. Typical was an Aug. 27 posting on democraticunderground.com with the headline, “ABC docudrama will blame Clinton and Dems for 9/11.”

Web sites comment on series

This week, such activist Web sites as moveon.org have launched e-mail campaigns against the film, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group, said Wednesday that it had collected 25,000 letters asking ABC to either correct or cancel the miniseries.

In recent days, demands for the film to be pulled have spread beyond the Web.

On Wednesday, four prominent House Democrats, including Jane Harman of Los Angeles, formally asked ABC for substantial revisions in the show. The film also has come under attack from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, objecting to the way she is portrayed in the film, and 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste.

At the same time, “Path” has been embraced by such conservative commentators as Rush Limbaugh, who told his radio audience last week that “the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about terrorism.”

Patterico’s Pontifications, a right-wing blog written by Los Angeles County attorney Justin Levine, said the miniseries is “free of political spin, politically correct whitewashing and partisan wrangling” and that “the Clinton administration will likely go ballistic over this film.”

Kean argued that controversy was almost inevitable given the nature of the film.

“I would have been surprised if people didn’t object,” he said. “It was a massive failure of government and it covers two administrations. People in both administrations aren’t going to be happy.”

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